Users can become surprisingly dependent on your site, give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask and gives users time to prepare, move data, swap contact details, backup and such.
I'm dealing with this issue right now with Snip.it. They were clearly in talks with Yahoo! about being purchased (and potentially others as they were putting out surveys every few months about usage and purpose that I filled out each and every time), but didn't inform any of us that the site would literally be shut off late one day and we would be unable to retrieve (or even look at in read-only mode) all of the data we'd put on the site.
We were initially able to grab a PDF or HTML file of the links we'd posted, but none of the additional descriptions we'd place along with them. They told us to try Kippt and Diigo but the way they'd formatted the file wasn't friendly to either of these services, which would lump them all together instead of separate them by the categories we'd placed them in (although it would "tag" them with the category, but that doesn't help me navigate when my tags aren't listed out anywhere). When I complained about the descriptions issue on their Facebook page, they added them a few days later and another service (keeeb) tried to reach out and ask them how they could better serve the fallout (not sure if they responded, but keeeb looks like a neat service). I got in touch with Kippt to ask if they could figure out a way to get the imports to work correctly since they were being advertised, and they asked for my export file and said they'd work on it, but I haven't heard anything back.
I don't care if your service is free or not (and I even informed Snip.it I would have paid for the service, as some people replied on the linked post did as well), you owe it to the users that gave a shit about you and wanted to see you succeed to have some sort of grace period, and better, to escort them to similar services so they aren't left completely in the dust, having spent months and years of time contributing to and advertising for your company. At least in my situation, they tried to do the latter, even though these services weren't actually anything like their own and couldn't parse the data.
Whatever Yahoo! plans on doing with the Snip.it team, I won't be using it. I hope they're happy they've alienated a vibrant and growing audience.
Understood, but the problem seems to be growing lately in the sense of "shoestring funded" startups going for broke. When it finally becomes apparent that the business can't continue there are not always a lot of resources left for a graceful shutdown.
My opinion is that the "you owe it to your users..." idea is dangerous. That line of thinking could eventually lead to a class action lawsuit over something like "lost images" from the next failed social pic app. Which increases the costs and risks associated with trying new ideas, which discourages that innovation.
I think that users need to better understand the web-things that they grow "attached" to, and not just continually expect all web sites to be free magic unicorn tears from the sky. This "fremium" model is honestly not scaling very feel, yet people are becoming more expectant that simple sites are free. The ad-supported avenue isn't working out all that great for advertisers, site owners, or users either.
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback if the very next day you are left with nothing, just as there is no incentive to try a service if it is forcing me to pay before so much as a demo or trial period.
The point I'm making isn't that free should stay free, but that if you know that something is going to happen to the service, your users deserve as much of an exit strategy as you do. I knew those surveys I took meant something, whether the site would be shut down or that they were using this data in meetings with potential investors. In one I wrote that I wanted to know whether or not I should be concerned and if I should be looking elsewhere.
As someone that used the site multiple times a day and relied on it only because the userbase was growing (evident by the number of people following me increasing exponentially each week), I didn't expect to be left out in the cold. If traction had slowed, I would have gotten the hint, but things seemed to be going somewhere and they were still actively working on it.
This seems similar to EveryBlock's situation in that the problem wasn't that it wasn't useful and growing, just that it wasn't in line with the parent company's vision. Selling it would have made more sense, just as with Snip.it, telling users the site would be shutting down at the end of February would have made a lot more sense than just putting up a static page apologizing and offering very little in the way of "moving on".
There's no incentive to try new services and give feedback
Note that in my original comment I said "... please don't become highly dependent...". By all means you SHOULD try new services, and offer your feedback and suggestions where possible if you think that the site has potential. But understand that it might not be a good idea to get overly invested in a site that does not have a clear ability to maintain its persistence.
If my intent is not to get invested, I'm not going to use it. I look at it, I toy around with it, and I decide whether or not it is applicable to my needs. If it is, I'm going to use it, and the more I use it, the more dependent I become on it. I don't see how not using a service helps anyone on either side of the fence. If I don't 'depend on it' - therefore not use it - it definitely won't continue to exist, free or not.
From the outset, nothing about the site looked like it was going under; they'd recently redesigned, they were adding/changing features, my collections were clearly getting picked up somehow without my assistance, they were still sending their newsletters and highlighting users. There was no way of knowing until the email hit our inboxes that afternoon, just hours after I'd last submitted a link.
Yes, but in this example it's not a shoestring funded startup. It's MSNBC. The parent company decided to shut it down abruptly and there was probably zero time to migrate anything. This stuff happens all the time at big companies when downsizing occurs.
At one of my previous positions, I was laid off and provided zero notice beforehand. They cut off my access in the middle of a production deploy and it failed in the middle.
Yeah, I'll just stop using your products and let your shareholders know it was because people on HackerNews knew better than to build solutions people will use.
I'm simply trying to point out that there are decisions you can control and decisions you can't. You can control what your life takes a dependency on, and how tightly coupled you are to particular products and services.
For different types of products and services, you have more or less control and confidence about the future of those products and services. For software that you own and run on your box, that control and confidence is higher. For services on which you are completely dependent on software running on someone else's box for which you have no contract or service level agreement, that confidence and control is lower.
You have control over whether you want to complain and whine when a service you've tightly coupled yourself to makes a change you find objectionable. You don't have control over that change. Understanding which decisions you do and don't have control over is useful.
There's a deep irony in telling people on a site like this not to use the tools that we all put our blood, sweat and tears into every day.
If onboarding wasn't such a big deal and something people needed in order to prove the market exists and there's money to be made, we wouldn't see a good portion of the posts here about it and we wouldn't see so many ShowHNs with people asking for advice on how to make it more clear for their target demographic.
At the end of the day this hurts everyone; dropping users with no where to go and with a fraction of the effort they put into your tool to begin with causes them to question how much they can trust new companies and services. It makes it harder for others to make the case that they are worth using at all, no less long-term.
To turn around and blame users for their so-called ignorance on the matter is ignorant itself. We beg them to sign on with us and then expect them to know that's what they were in for when we kick them to the curb? This problem isn't exclusive to freemium models, either, which is even worse.
Perhaps I'm approaching this from a different perspective which is why I think my comments came across more abrasive than I meant them.
I'm certainly not trying to blame users for ignorance. I personally, however, have a strong aversion to coupling myself to tools and services whose future I have low confidence in. What I was trying to impart to mnicole as a consumer was this aversion. The lesson I'd send to the rest of the development community is that if you structure your tool or service in a way that it is not possible for me to either have a low dependency on you or a high confidence in your future, you fail the sniff test.
Why should a user know about a sites business model? To an average joe you letting me sign up and do stuff is all I know. While "giving a week" isn't a rule, it sure sounds like it might be the nicer thing to do.
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response, but in all reality its not the users responsibility to provide longevity.
And lets face it, we (startups) would be totally f'd if users didn't become entirely dependent on our services early doors, perhaps even pre-biz model.
You spout your answer like its the obvious and "derrr" response
You make a good point, and I did not mean that as the "obvious" response, I meant it as a simple counter-response. As I kind of mentioned in my other comment, I think there can be many cases where the startup that is shutting down is going to be unable to afford a graceful wind-down, for various reasons.
Startups and Users are basically at-will employers and employees in a sense. Either can leave the other unexpectedly at any time, and I think it would be wise to approach things with the understanding that neither should expect the other to "just be there".
>And lets face it, we (startups) would be totally f'd if users didn't become entirely dependent on our services early doors, perhaps even pre-biz model.
I (and many other people) try to educate users not to do this. It's an uphill battle, most people are not interested until the day they lose a bunch of their data when some startup webapp they uses has burned through all their cash and closes down. This is becoming increasingly common though, so I think people are starting to realise that they can't trust cloud services/web apps. I'd like to think raising awareness will help end the trend towards centralised computing that denies users control of their data, but most people still don't even back up their local files, so…
These kinds of shutdowns are useful examples for the next time I'm having this discussion with somebody. Although I'd rather a bunch of people didn't have to lose data I feel nothing will change until this happens a quite a few more times with bigger sites.
Which is to say, I'm afraid I hope you are "totally f'd" because web startups are a malign force when it comes to data security. It's nothing personal…
But I think what Geoff said about what startups want is very interesting, and true. We persuade users to depend on us because we need it for success. To then turn around as a community and say "ha, why did you do that, idiot?" seems disingenuous to me.
'Turning around' implies it's the same group of users doing both. I, for one, have never persuaded a user to depend on a startup; I am squarely on the side of advising users never to depend on anything without a well-understood business plan, EVER.
Did they not have ads? Because "free with ads" supports most of the internet, and I don't think anyone can tell which things they should rely on and which they can't.
I mean, once they were bought by NBC, they din't seem any less dependable than MSNBC or such.
The general idea is that startups which shut down like this impose a cost on _every other startup_ out there, because it makes people more hesitant to actually use and rely on services provided by startups due to their memory of being burned. Yes, this includes the next startup that the people working on that particular startup are going to work on too.
EveryBlock was acquired by MSNBC in 2009, and NBCUniversal took full control of MSNBC in 2012. NBC which has now decided to shut EB down effective immediately and little to no warning even to everyblock itself (they launched a new service exactly a month ago: http://blog.everyblock.com/2013/jan/07/neighbor-ads/).
a) It can be too much to ask. They owe you nothing.
b) EveryBlock was bought by NBC. They're hardly a startup anymore.
c) If the service is free, watch your stuff. This sort of thing WILL happen.
I totally agree. I think loose "startups" for "service", though.
Us as service creators and owners do to a certain degree have a level of responsibility to the users, I get the value exchange of users time/use <> us maintaining the service is enough to make some people think that the responsibility check is "balanced" but we're talking 7 days. These users invested THEIR time, confidence and love into your service, they might have (whether directly or indirectly) paid your salary.
"give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask"
Do you think that the "one week period" is going to get continued funding? I doubt most are given that much time ahead to prepare, let alone able to prepare to give the users the ability to prepare.
this assumes the startup in question has some sort of control over the situation. I bet that isn't always the case. I'm sure ideally everyblock would have liked to wind things down a little less abruptly, but sometimes, reality sucks.
Users can become surprisingly dependent on your site, give a week warning before closing out if you can. It's not too much to ask and gives users time to prepare, move data, swap contact details, backup and such.